The De-Bimbo-ization Of Super Bowl Ads? A Girl Can Dream

For the last 20 years at least, viewers have been taught to watch super-carefully for the super-pricey commercials -- aka,
the “Super Bowl of ads.”

Because there was always a running score, over the years the winning formulas have devolved into slapstick jokes (men getting hit in their gentleman
parts) and stupid animal tricks. (This year’s teasers include several bears and at least one llama.)

There are always the unexpected celebrity human tricks, too: Arnold Schwarzenegger
appears this year as self-parody in a bad wig, perhaps fulfilling the role of Fabio.

Plus, despite the fact that we are well into the 21st century, we can usually bank on some easy,
teasy, cleavage-based appearances by various womens’ boobs in the service of selling everything from cars to corn chips.

So I am encouraged that a new mini-trend might be on the
horizon. Yup, we might have finally reached so low that the standard lowest-common-denominator approach has outlived its shelf life.

Sex is ubiquitous: In this age of Kim Kardashian tweeting
selfies of her private parts for the benefit of Kanye and millions of intimate friends, brands can’t rely on the usual visual shock anymore. They have to get more strategic and creative.

In that spirit, both Axe, the body spray for boys, and GoDaddy, the Web hosting company, have given up their typical soft-porny approaches for more mature messages.

In 60 seconds of
sweeping cinematic storytelling, Axe has, for the moment anyway, moved from blatant sex to politics. The spot redoes famous scenes of war and aggression in favor of romance. The idea sounds kind of dumb, but
it’s so well-produced that it comes off as sweet and beautiful.

This is
GoDaddy’s ninth year on the Super Bowl. The company has become notorious for in-house spots that feature GoDaddy girls, including race car driver Danica Patrick, in “too racy for the Super
Bowl censors!” fantasy gambits that frequently sent viewers to the Web site to see the uh, unadulterated version.

The spots tended to be corny and porny; I could never understand how the
company was as successful as it was with ads that alienated a great many of its prospects. But what did I know. As an online brand, GoDaddy immediately registered how its ads fared, by number of
clicks. And every year, business doubled.

In 2011, Bob Parsons sold the company to a trio of private equity firms, and stepped down as CEO. The new investors moved to an ad agency -- Deutsch
-- and attempted to inject a little business rigor into the message by showing how beauty and brains combine. One of the results -- involving
swimsuit model Bar Rafaeli (representing beauty) noisily making out with a younger, doughy, red-faced uber-nerd (representing brains) -- so devalued the meaning of a kiss that it actually managed to
repel me more than any of the company’s previous spots.

And I was not alone. More than 7,500 tweets were directed at the company, denouncing the ad for being sexist. (In addition to the
grossness factor, it also portrayed women and men as only being good for one thing each.)

GoDaddy’s new spot that was
released early involves Danica Patrick in a sea of near-nudity. In agreeing to don a fake muscle suit and run with a group of male bodybuilders, she’s really taking one for the team. And all the
muscles, whether prosthetic or not, do get attention (Perhaps the thinking was, well, we still get to show breast tissue….) The joke is that they all head to a tanning shop run by a young,
female, small-business owner. (It’s much more P.C. to show male bodybuilders getting tanned than female beauty contestants, I guess.)

Research shows that more than half of the small
businesses in the U.S. are owned by women. And, increasingly, they are able to open their own companies by relying on services like GoDaddy for their mobile sales, ad placements and search functions,
in addition to Web-hosting.

So bravo for the GoDaddy shift: from showing women as beauty objects to portraying them as business owners. It’s about time.

A second spot,
which isn’t being pre-released, shows a person (presumably a woman) quitting her job live to start her own online business. It’s presumably based on a video that got millions of
hits, in which a woman put her late-night resignation on YouTube.

It’s no longer a simplistic “take this job and shove it!” culture. It’s more like “I now
have the tools to do this, and in a jobless recovery, what do I have to lose?”

And maybe this is the year that we can even retire the phrase “scantily clad.” Although for
every action, there’s a reaction. I suppose Kim Kardashian considers herself a business owner, too.

If it truly is a trend, it's certainly one to be lauded. I guess we'll know by the end of the night on Sunday.

One of the factors that may – just may – be contributing here is the growing reliance on viral teasers and pre-releases that now seem to be SOP. With millions of consumers choosing to see, pay attention to, share and comment on these spots far in advance of the "big game," could advertisers be responding to the increased scrutiny by choosing to be better behaved (and, frankly, smarter in their strategies)? Let's hope so.

My yearly look-forward-to-Sunday, and not just for the game, but those commercials. Great piece, courageous and stunningly witty, Barbara. We men seem to gravitate toward the belittling and sexist in products these days, granted, but it has exceeded its humor and appeal,at least for me. I often cringe, even look around at empty chairs when I watch some of the blatant challenges to sensible fun in advertising. I'm tired of feeling all too often embarrassed by these awkward and childish efforts to appeal to the most base islands of my make brain. Bravo, Barbara Lippert, for your smack on swing of the bat...you nailed it!

I just saw a Super Bowl spot that featured a gorgeous young blonde and a tall, dark and handsome fellow fall for each other. Neither was presented as a bimbo. Once again, Budweiser plucks the heartstrings.

MediaPost Editor-At-Large Barbara Lippert (barbara@mediapost.com) covers the intersection of pop culture, advertising and marketing. For many years, Lippert was the award-winning author of the Adweek Critique. She speaks at conferences and appears on TV as an expert on media trends and advertising imagery.